


Loving you for centuries

by There_Once_Was_A_Girl



Series: Random WIPs [1]
Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: AU, Angst, Angst?, Druids, Fluff, Idk I'm just fucking around, Immortality, M/M, Reincarnation, absurdity, sure
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-09-28 15:56:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20428559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/There_Once_Was_A_Girl/pseuds/There_Once_Was_A_Girl
Summary: Hawkeye was born in 150 BC Ireland as a druid and was made immortal by grateful dryads whose lives he saved, he knew Trapper in his first life, and has been waiting for him to be reincarnated for thousands of years.This is one of Many WIPs in various fandoms which I will be posting to see if there's any interest in them.





	Loving you for centuries

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't Beta'ed or even really edited so forgive me, I'm just throwing a bunch of WIPs out there

Hawkeye had been through countless wars. He was born in a small town of Celtic people in what would someday be Ireland, in 150 BCE, about a hundred years before Caesar invaded Britain. His people were druids, and Hawkeye’s father was a healer by trade and taught Hawkeye how to be as well. When Hawkeye was still young they got called to an emergency in the forest. To their shock and alarm it was a young Dryad who was injured. They saved her, and from then on they got several calls into the forest for the dryads. They were druids so they helped. Of course, as a druid who knew several dryads personally it was hard to continue worshipping them. He had never been very religiously minded anyway. 

When Hawkeye was thirty years old and his father was older than most people expected to get, Daniel (who was called Darkleaf back then) the dryads came to them and gave them an offer. Neither of them were wise enough to refuse it then. Really, despite everything that came afterwards, Hawkeye still did not regret it. Immortal life was a hard thing, but if he was honest, dying before all of modern history would have been a shame. Still it was hard, living as long as he did. He and his father had to leave home not long after that, they couldn’t explain why neither of them aged anymore. 

They traveled Ireland and Britain for some time, and then continued East. They ended up in Rome itself where Daniel started up a business as an apothecary and Hawkeye learned everything he could from the healers of Rome, and continued working. The emperor himself tried to hire him as a personal healer but Hawkeye always worked for the common people. He also seemed to find himself in a lot of wars. He never fought but he always did his best to help save everyone regardless of sides. Hawkeye for the most part, did not believe in sides. Now when you got people like the Nazis it was easy but a great many wars did not have villains. What wars had were innocent bystanders, and for the most part he was there for them.

All in all living forever as a doctor wasn’t too bad. He went back to school almost once a lifetime because things kept changing, they kept learning more and more. Of course sometimes a good druidic spell worked the best in a pinch but he didn’t tell anyone that was what fixed them. He lived through times when his pansexuality was the norm and then into times when people would have killed him for it. He adjusted to the times fairly easily. Living as long as he had you learned to roll with the times. He had been married a few times, had a few life partners before. It was hard to find someone who put up with him, who suited him, who stayed long enough and he trusted long enough, but it happened. Nothing was quite the same as what he had with a young fur trapper he met not long after he and his father left their hometown though. He had loved the man, who went by Trapper since it was hard for Hawkeye to pronounce his name back then, more than anything. They had been inseparable. Trapper had come with Hawkeye and his father when they moved around. He stayed at Hawkeye’s side even after he got old enough that their relationship was frowned upon seeing as Hawkeye still looked about thirty years old. Neither of them cared. Trapper was with him until he died in his sleep at the old--ridiculously old for those days--age of a hundred and one. Hawkeye had met him at the age of thirty five and had loved him for nearly seventy years and he never stopped. He went so far as to go to the dryads who had gifted him immortality and plead with them. 

“Bring him back,” he begged, “Please. bring him back or let me join him, I can’t do this without him.”

“You can,” one said. 

“You will,” another agreed. 

“Humanity has need of you.”

“Then please bring him back to me, you can do that can’t you?” Hawkeye begged. they all shook their heads. 

“We cannot bring back the dead,” said one. 

“But you will see him again,” 

“Different body, same soul,” 

“He’s going to be reincarnated?” Hawkeye asked. They exchanged looks. 

“Yes.” They agreed speaking together. 

“We will ensure he bears the same name, the one you call him by, in some fashion. So you might know him.”

“Though you will likely know him anyway.”

“When one is old enough one recognizes a soul they’ve met before.” 

“It will not be for some time,” one warned. 

“To souls, hundreds and thousands of years not alive are nothing,”

“You must take the long way while he rests,”

“Your father and you are no longer normal souls, normal souls need rest between lives, you do not.”

“When you find him he will not remember.”

“His soul will know you, his mind will not.” 

“You must be delicate if you wish him to love you again,” 

“But if he does…”

“And if he’s willing…”

“Bring him back to us.” 

“And if you are still loyal.” 

“If we feel you’ve lived well.”

“We will see you never parted.” 

“Thank you, I will find him again. We will be back, I swear.” Hawkeye promised. 

Throughout all time Hawkeye looked for Trapper, and he never stopped loving him. It didn’t stop him from loving other people, from marrying, from living, but he was always waiting. It was one of the many reasons he hated being involved in wars, despite his continued presence in them. He and his father could heal from sicknesses and minor injuries better than anyone, and they would never age or die that way. However if someone chopped their heads off, blew them to pieces or stabbed/shot them through the heart, they would be as dead as anyone else. Of course living forever gave one well honed skills at being very “lucky” in such situations, but wars were risky. 

Still, when Hawkeye was two thousand and one hundred years old he landed in Korea in the middle of a war zone. Not really by choice admittedly. It was hard to explain to the US draft board that you already did your time in WWII, and WWI, and plenty before that. (Hawkeye and his father had been on the side of the first nations people in all the early American wars, whatever side that ended up being. It didn’t go much good but they had tried). The 4077th wasn’t much but he had worked in much worse conditions before so he wasn’t particularly fussed about it. Then, only a few days after he arrived, Captain John McIntyre arrived at their unit. 

When Hawkeye first saw him he couldn’t be sure. He looked entirely different from the skinny, tall, dark skinned Trapper he knew, but there was something about him that was familiar. When Hawkeye got close and offer him a hand he realized his eyes were the same. The blue/green had been startling against the dark skin Trapper had once had but were unremarkable with his current pale complexion and curly blond hair. What made Hawkeye sure though was when Trapper smiled just before his hand met Hawkeye’s. His smile was identical. Two thousand forty-nine years and Hawkeye remembered his smile exactly, remember his face, and how it felt to be near him. Two thousand forty nine years, since before Common Era Hawkeye had been looking for Trapper, and there he was, in his class A army uniform, shaking Hawkeye’s hand. 

“Dr John McIntyre, but my friends call me Trapper or Trapper John,” he said. His voice was different and it was odd to hear him speaking English, but his words still sounded like music to Hawk’s ears. 

“This is Captain Benjamin Franklin Pierce, our best cutter,” Henry said. 

“Hawkeye,” Hawkeye said, “Please, call me Hawkeye.”

“Nice to meet you, Hawkeye,” Trapper said. 

“Yes, wonderful to meet you, Trapper,” Hawkeye said, grinning and shoving back his shock and awe. He couldn’t afford to be weird about this. This was his second chance. Sure he was the man Hawkeye had been in love with all his life and looking for for two thousand years, but Trapper did not know that yet. Also important: Trapper had a ring on his left hand. He was married, married to someone not Hawkeye because he didn’t have tree nymphs telling him they were destined to meet.

The first few days were hard. It was hard to sleep on the opposite side of the tent from Trapper when he just wanted to hold him. It was hard not to talk about things from his first life, especially when Trappet smiled. For the first time in centuries Hawkeye kept almost slipping into his native dialect of Celtic which he only ever spoke with his father and wasn’t even a dialect that people knew had existed let alone still remembered. Trapper had spoken a more common dialect natively but he knew Hawkeye’s. He had taught Hawkeye his language but they both preferred the one they first spoke together. It was hard not asking Trapper if he felt the easy connection between them. 

It got easier though. It was easy to talk to Trapper, to ask him about his life. Trapper was married to a woman named Louise and they had two daughters, Kathy and Becky. While he seems rather indifferent to his wife and as happy to chase as many nurses as Hawkeye does, Trapper loves his daughters. He loves them in a way Hawkeye understands completely. He has always avoided having children at all costs. He knew from a young age that having kids would mean outliving them, and that that would destroy him. He managed it for a long time too, but sometimes… things happen. 

Jasmine was his last wife, she had died just after the first world war, of the spanish flu. She had given birth to their daughter Lucy two years earlier. Hawkeye had tried to distance himself from the idea of Lucy throughout all of Jasmine’s pregnancy. He had told himself that he would not fall madly in love with his daughter. It was hopeless. The moment she was born she became the light of his life. After her mother died and it was just him, Lucy and his father… she was everything to him. She was brilliant and beautiful, and the most wonderful person he knew. If he could have kept her mother alive for her, stayed married, given up immortality and grown old with Jasmine so they could give Lucy the normalest happiest life they could, he would have done it. Children changed things, they just did. Trapper had his own children, was married to their mother… and Hawkeye’s plans of sweeping Trapper off his feet would ruin that. 

It is impossible that he is thinking what he is thinking, after all the time he spent looking, but he does it anyway. Hawkeye called his dad, because there is no one else he can ask or even talk to about it Lucy hadn’t known Trapper like his dad had. She only knew stories.

“Hawkeye what a lovely surprise, is everything okay?” his father said in English in greeting. 

“Dad, I found him, Trapper. He’s here, he’s a surgeon, damn good one too.” Hawkeye said in Celtic to thwart Radar listening. 

“Oh my gods” (a word which in their language also meant dryads/trees) “what is it like?”

“He’s perfect, dad. He’s got the same eyes and the same smile, the same personality. He looks a lot different, white, shorter, curly blond hair. But it’s him. I wondered if maybe after all this time it wouldn’t be… I don’t know… the same? Worth it? But it is. He doesn’t remember me obviously but for me it’s like all of a sudden the past two thousand years haven’t happened, like I never lost him.”

“That is wonderful, and yet I sense a But coming in all this,” his dad answered, “what’s wrong?”

“He’s married. He has a wife and two kids, daughters. He loves his girls dad, I mean they are the most important thing in the world to him,”

“Yes, I can imagine,” his father answered with a little chuckle. Hawkeye grimmed a little at that. In all practicality, in comparison to their lifetimes as a whole, his father wasn’t much older than him, but he was always, resolutely his father. 

“I can’t screw that up though,” Hawkeye said at last, finally admitting what he had started to think deep down since Trapper first told him about the girls. “I mean, they are a family, and I want to come in and steal away their father. That isn’t… how can I?” 

“Tell me something Hawkeye,” his father murmured, “you’ve been looking for Trapper for over two thousand years. You loved him before Christianity was a blip on the radar of mankind and you love him still. All that time you knew he would not remember you when you found him again. All that time you knew that you had no guarantee that he would love you again, but you have looked and you have never stopped loving him. That takes a special kind of devotion. But tell me this, after all those years, all that love: What do you want from him?” 

“I… I just want to be with him,” Hawkeye answered, “be near him, hear his laugh, see his smile, have him in my life and be able to love him and make him happy. More than anything I want to see him happy again…. which I guess means not taking him from his wife, because that would take him from his kids…” the words hurt to say. His father sighed. 

“Truly? I mean sincerely, Hawkeye. I want you to he honest down to your bones, with yourself even if you aren’t with me. Do you honest to the gods want him to be happy, above all else? I am not asking to judge you, or to shame you or direct you to a path I think is right. I believe the right path is the one that leads you to what you truly want most. Your answer directs your own path.” 

“I want him to love me back,” Hawkeye said quietly, “I want to spend eternity with him, but… but not as much as I just want to be in his life and see him happy.” 

“You always were too selfless for your own good,” his father commented, “what do you plan on doing?” Hawkeye took a deep breath, gathering in a thousand hopes and dreams and desires, held them tight for a moment, and with a sigh released them into the wind. 

“I am going to be his friend,” he said. “I am going to look out for him, and make sure he is happy.” He let go of all of it, and resolved to simply let his love direct him towards making Trapper happy. It was a hard thing to do, harder for a man who had lived as long as him, but he knew it was the right choice. It was oddly freeing to have let go of all the strings he had been desperately trying to cling to. No pressure of trying to make Trapper fall in love with him. No trying to decide whether to tell him or not about their past. No planning everything around an eventual trip back to the dryads. No worrying about the past two thousand years or the next two thousand. Only love and companionship. 

“You’re a better man than most, Son,” his father said, “Good luck.”

“Thanks. Love you, dad.”

“Love you too.” Hawkeye hung up with a sigh. Radar came back in and frowned at him looking disgruntled. 

“Go on and ask Radar,” Hawkeye invited.

“Now what sort of language was that?!” Radar demanded. 

“Ancient Celtic. My father taught it to me. We use it with each other so no one can overhear and because it reminds me of my childhood. When I was younger I loved the secret feeling of just us two having a language we spoke together,” Hawkeye answered. None of this was a lie. 

“Oh, that’s sorta cool, you and your old man having ways to stay close like that.” Radar said looking impressed. 

“Thanks, Radar,” Hawkeye said. “I gotta go, thanks for putting my call through for me though. I owe you one.”

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know if there is literally any interest in my posting more of this


End file.
